Digital Storytelling and English Language Learners

A few weeks ago I participated in two workshops, back to back, neither of which was directly related to my teaching of ELL students, but, will, I hope, inform what I am going to try to do next fall in a new class for me:  Academic Language Development (ALD).  It is a course designed for long term Ell students, who need a focused curriculum on the language of school--academic literacy.  More on that and what that means in time.  For now I want to focus on the first workshop I took--Digital Storytelling.  I took a 3 day course at the center for digital storytelling located in Berkeley, California.  There were 10 participants from all the over the country--educators from elementary to college level. The focus was on creating a digital story using only the ipad technology.  The focus of this organization is on the personal story, however I wanted to learn the form in order to see how I can use it with the ALD class next year.  I came in to the workshop with the idea of telling a story about why telling the Odyssey every year to all of my students (both my drama students and ell students) is a singular focus for me.  I, however, didn't know what shape that story would take. Using a variety of writing prompts and activities, an idea emerged, and then over the course of the 3 days I honed the script to under 300 words (not easy) and found images and music to support my script.  The most interesting activity was walking around the neighborhood surrounding the offices of center where the workshop took place, with a checklist and our ipad or iphone as a camera.  The checklist included many different things to look for but the one that propelled my somewhat dry topic of why I tell the Odyssey, into a personal journey of discovery, was to take a picture of something that reminded me of my childhood.  Behind a chain linked fence, on a rock strewn field were a group of kids playing soccer.  No adults around, just kids playing soccer.  Many were latino kids I recognized from my school.  It reminded me of my long ago Brooklyn days, playing stickball, baseball, football, whatever, in abandoned lots, strewn with rocks and garbage, without adults running drills or keeping tabs on us.  Just kids playing.  When I got back to the class and shared my image a story came up, that through questions from the group, brought up another story that formed the basis of my digital story.  It was a story of my father and how, just before little league tryouts, took me to a nearby school and had me stand against a chain link fence.  He told me to hold the bat on my shoulder, to get into a ready batting stance.  I did as he said, and then he paced off the distance that a little league mound was from the batters box--45 feet as I recall.  Then he yelled, just stand there--don't swing.  And then he wound up (now it needs to be said at this point that my father was a pitcher during his youth in both a navy team during WWII, and had had tryouts for minor league affiliates of the NY Yankees in the late '40s)

and threw the ball straight at my head.  Just in time I hurled myself to the ground.  He said:  Now your ready to play on a team.  That was our practice.  How that relates to why I tell the Odyssey you can see in the attached video.  Next time I want to explore how to use digital storytelling in the classroom.

Words that lead to stories

     What words remind you of a story?  Does the word apple conjure something, a narrative perhaps, in your imagination?  How about the word river, or devil, or queen?  Of course there are words that inhabit the world of story for students.  In this activity students broke into groups of 3 or 4, and armed with their own knowledge and dictionaries, began to create alphabetical lists of words that evoked a story for them.  We will use them, and add to them, throughout the coming weeks to create stories and therefore language (think of these as the bricks, and all the connecting words, verbs and sentence structures we need to make them come alive as the mortar).  Here's a photo of one groups efforts.

Thursday, October 17

Oh my, oh my.  Three weeks have gone by since my last post.  I am here now to say the group has been busy and really getting used to the idea of using drama to learn English.  I’ve been thinking about narrative a lot.  In particular how all my students, regardless of their cultural background, have a keen understanding of story.  Not just an understanding but also a need.  A need to use language to story.  To story in order to make sense of experience.  I’ve told many stories in class that we then use to create tableaux (still pictures) and build dialogue out of.  I also play a game, almost daily, called freeze tag that makes use of kids inherent need and desire to make a story out of what they see.  The basics are this:

We sit in a circle.  Two students enter the middle and move around the space—they walk, they dance, they do whatever until I call freeze.  They are now in a frozen pose, a tableau.  I call freeze when I think they are in some pose that “poses” interesting possibilities.  I then ask the other students what is the story here.  We build on this for awhile and then I ask someone else to take over for one of the performers and create a new pose that creates a new relationship and therefore a new story.  And we continue.  Lots more can be built from this basic game:  with students very new to English I might ask them to tell me a word about what they see.  To more experienced students I press them and extend their language to build a fully formed narrative.  It has become my favorite routine in the class because it is filled with both theatrical and linguistic possibilities.

Sunday, September 14, 2013

 ROUTINES  PART I
     It's been a few weeks in and routines have been established and the kids are doing great work.  We are up to 23 students representing the following home languages:  Spanish, French (including Hatian Creole), Russian, Tagalog, Urdu, Manike, (west african), Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, and Hindi.  It's a great mix of kids with lots of different language and academic skills.  Here are the routines established for the 90 minute class (twice a week, once a week it is 45 minutes)
1.  Students enter, get their journals and write the heading of the class and the date and the target academic vocabulary word of the day
     English through Drama
     Tuesday, September 10, 2013

vocabulary:
feature

I then read the heading and begin talking and demonstrating my own understanding of the vocabulary word.  The academic vocabulary word is something the entire school is committed to teaching  across all subjects.  These are high use, high frequency words that form the basis of academic skills, but are often not explicitly taught.  All high achieving students will pick these words up without direct instruction.  The premise is that we need to explicitly teach these words, especially to english language learners.  I refer anyone interested to look at the work of Kate Kinsella, among others, to get a greater understanding of this concept.

After I talk (very simply and through a lot of gesture), I ask students to turn and talk to another student or a group of students, and come up with a sentence or two of what that word means to them.
I then circulate around working with the newest of the newcomers, but even in a class composed mostly of newcomers, I found that my explanation/demonstration has given access to the word for most.
I then write a few of the student definitions/understandings, and then write my own.  All students copy at least one of the students (or use their own) and all copy mine.

then I explain the language goal of the day and then the drama goals and activities we will use to get at those language goals.  I find that making this explicit really helps the kids see that all the drama activities we will do that day will, in fact, lead them to grow in their English skills.

all this takes about 10 minutes.  Kids are speaking about 30% of the time, not enough if we are to use the percentage that most studies indicate are optimal for student growth in ELD instruction: 50%.  So then next activities (routines) are designed to pump up the amount of guided student talk. 

Next up is Routine number two--the drama game, "Yes, Let's"

First week summary:  We did an activity has both language and drama possibilities.  It is a common drama game called object transformation.  The basics are this:  A person stands in front of the group holding a common object.  We used a marker, but it could be an eraser, a ruler, anything you have in the classroom.  For English Language Learners we provide a sentence frame for them to work with.
It was this:
"This is not a marker, this is a________________. "  They name another noun,  and then they dramatically transform that marker into the new object.  It could be anything.  For example if a student said:  "This is not a marker this is a dog" , he or she would pet their marker, and even say words, like "Nice dog".  We broke up into groups and each group of 5 came up with as many transformations as they could.  They then performed them for the rest of the group. I'll add this now, but I'll write more about it in later posts:  daily performance expectations are crucial for young english language learners, as they should be spending at least 50% of their time (according to the latest research) talking. The sentence frame is also crucial for ELL students (unnecessary as a mainstream drama game) in that it gives everyone, even the newest of newcomers,  something to work with and models english language structure.  Students could use whatever simple nouns they might know (cat and dog are the most common for the newest language learners).  For more advanced learners coming up with unusual words was the challenge posed to them.  The first time the kids mostly did gestures to indicate the new object.  Here is a list of what the class came up with:
 

A bomb, red bull, a shoe, a dog, La Llorona, a book, a tomahawk, a plane, a hot dog, Ms. Rathwell’s nose, a boat, lipstick, nail polish, a bow and arrow, a gun, a telescope a knife, a building, Pinocchio’s nose, a unicorn, a cane, a shark, a bunny, a wolf, a door, gum, a magic wand, a pen, a boyfriend, a computer, a telephone, glasses, a cigarette.

Our  next step will be working with this list, adding specific words and phrases that can be said with each transformation.  We will also make a list of verbs or actions that help to communicate to others what their new object is.  Many possibilities, including scene creation, dialogue and tableux are possible to extend both the dramatic and language possibilities.  We'll see what we do with this tomorrow.

Drama and ELL students

The new school year started.  I teach many sections of drama at my school. All sixth graders (nearly 300 of them) cycle through me for a 9 week wheel class.  Then there is a 7/8th grade full year drama elective for about 35 students, a 7/8th grade class specifically for English Language Learners (ELL), and an after school theatre ensemble of nearly 50 students, who train as an ensemble and then perform theatre for the rest of the school.
      For the time being I want to focus on writing about the work I do with English Language Learners, specifically on using drama to facilitate their learning/acquisition of English through drama.  This will be the 4th year that I have taught a class that does just that.  It has about 22 7th and 8th grade students representing many different languages.  Many are newcomers with little if any experience in English.  Some are long term EL's.  I will outline lessons I use and thoughts about the process of using Drama to teach English.
     I just met my students a few days ago and I don't fully know each of the their stories or home languages.  I know that so far we have Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian and Tagalog speakers and, if past years are any indication,  more will come as the year progresses.  It is a mixture of students who are very educated in their primary language, as well as students whose schooling was fairly spotty in their home countries. 
Many of my friends who teach theatre ask me what I do to teach English using drama.  My short answer is I do similar drama activities to what I do with mainstream drama classes.  The difference is I begin by looking at things through the lens of language acquisition.  I think about specific language goals and how that activity will help support that.  And we work from there. 
     My experience has taught me that drama is a natural form for teaching language.  Over the course of this year my plan is to share the specifics  of our work in the class, as well as readings, resources and also add insights about language teaching I gain from my experience as a home based English  teacher for a Karen (Burma/Myanmar) refugee family in Oakland, California.

The show: links to video and photos

Well it happened.  As we always know it will.  We've been working since sept 1 as a theatre ensemble, and 5 months later we put on 4 shows. The student audiences (we perform for our student body, 3 times, each audience about 350 students) enjoyed the show, but the community audience, with about 300 parents, friends and community members in attendance, really got it.  The humor as well as the deeper scenes.  You could see the student actors respond to laughs and bringing their performance to another level. 

It is difficult for me to assess this project.  It began with a great need to create theatre out of my travels, to use theatre to make sense of what I had seen in Turkey.  But it grew into much more, for this is what theatre does, it forced a whole new way of thinking throughout the process.  I have lived with this play and its ideas for nearly a half a year.  And now it's over.  I am glad we undertook it.  It was good to see 35 plus middle school students wrestle with profound issues and it was good for me to learn some new things.  The big thing I learned is that it isn't easy to do good, interesting work.  But it is worth it.
Here are links to video: 
http://vimeo.com/36220233

and photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/53901376@N04/sets/72157629166269491/

I'll have to begin blogging about something else..